Ben Affleck takes poverty vow: Eat on $1.50 a day

Newly-anointed World’s Most Beautiful Woman Gwyneth Paltrow has famously dismissed the plebs who criticize her extravagant lifestyle. “F— the haters!” she told Elle UK in 2009. “I am who I am. I can’t pretend to be somebody who makes $25,000 a year.”

But apparently, the same isn’t true for Paltrow’s old flame Ben Affleck. The Oscar-winning director recently signed on to participate in the Global Poverty Project’s Live Below the Line, a campaign that challenges average (and above-average) people to live on just $1.50 a day for five days. The initiative is meant to simulate what it’s like for the 1.4 billion people worldwide who live in extreme poverty. Getting by on that pittance every day would actually mean spending just $547.5 per year – which makes $25,000 look like a pretty princely sum.

Affleck is following in the footsteps of Hugh Jackman, who first started working with Live Below the Line in 2011. Stars including Josh Groban and The Avengers’s Tom Hiddleston are living below the line this year as well. Here’s a clip of the Wolverine star promoting the initiative in 2012: